Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

  The judge followed him with his eyes. The kid circled the floor of the well, no part of which was altogether beyond the judge's reach, and he knelt opposite the imbecile and pulled the stopper from the flask and submerged the flask in the basin. He and the imbecile watched the water run in at the neck of the flask and they watched it bubble and they watched it cease. The kid stoppered the flask and leaned and drank from the pool and then he sat back and looked at Toadvine.

  Are you goin with us?

  Toadvine looked at the judge, I dont know, he said. I'm subject to arrest. They'll arrest me in California.

  Arrest ye?

  Toadvine didnt answer. He was sitting in the sand and he made a tripod of three fingers and stuck them in the sand before him and then he lifted and turned them and poked them in again so that there were six holes in the form of a star or a hexagon and then he rubbed them out again. He looked up.

  You wouldnt think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?

  The kid rose and slung the flask by its strap over his shoulder. His trouserleg was black with blood and the bloody stump of the shaft jutted from his thigh like a peg for hanging implements upon. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and he looked at Toadvine. It aint country you've run out of, he said. Then he made his way across the sink and up the bank. The judge followed him with his eyes and when the kid reached the sunlight at the top he turned and looked back and the judge was holding open the satchel between his naked thighs.

  Five hundred dollars, he said. Powder and ball included.

  The expriest was at the kid's side. Do him, he hissed.

  The kid took the pistol but the expriest clung to his arm whispering and when the kid pulled away he spoke aloud, such was his fear.

  You'll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is unarmed. God's blood, do you think you'll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of God. Do it or I swear your life is forfeit.

  The judge smiled, he tapped his temple. The priest, he said. The priest has been too long in the sun. Seven-fifty and that's my best offer. It's a seller's market.

  The kid put the pistol in his belt. Then with the expriest at his elbow importunate he circled the crater and they set out west across the pan. Toadvine climbed up and watched them. After a while there was nothing to see.

  That day their way took them upon a vast mosaic pavement cobbled up from tiny blocks of jasper, carnelian, agate. A thousand acres wide where the wind sang in the groutless interstices. Traversing this ground toward the east riding one horse and leading another came David Brown. The horse he led was saddled and bridled and the kid stood with his thumbs in his belt and watched while he rode up and looked down at his old companions.

  We heard you were in the juzgado, said Tobin.

  I was, said Brown. I aint now. His eyes catalogued them in every part. He looked at the piece of arrowshaft protruding from the kid's leg and he looked into the expriest's eyes. Where's your outfits? he said.

  You're lookin at them.

  You fall out with Glanton?

  Glanton's dead.

  Brown spat a dry white spot in that vast and broken plateland. He had a small stone in his mouth against the thirst and he shifted it with his jaw and looked at them. The Yumas, he said.

  Aye, said the expriest.

  All rubbed out?

  Toadvine and the judge are at the well back yonder.

  The judge, said Brown.

  The horses stared bleakly at the crazed stone floor whereon they stood.

  The rest gone under? Smith? Dorsey? The nigger?

  All, said Tobin.

  Brown looked east across the desert. How far to the well?

  We left about an hour past daybreak.

  Is he armed?

  He is not.

  He studied their faces. The priest dont lie, he said.

  No one spoke. He sat fingering the scapular of dried ears. Then he turned the horse and rode on, leading the riderless animal behind. He rode watching back at them. Then he stopped again.

  Did you see him dead? he called. Glanton?

  I did, called the expriest. For he had so.

  He rode on, turned slightly in the saddle, the rifle on his knee. He kept watch behind him on those pilgrims and they on him. When he was well diminished on the pan they turned and went on.

  By noon the day following they had begun to come again upon abandoned gear from the caravans, cast shoes and pieces of harness and bones and the dried carcasses of mules with the alparejas still buckled about. They trod the faint arc of an ancient lake shore where broken shells lay like bits of pottery frail and ribbed among the sands and in the early evening they descended among a series of dunes and spoilbanks to Carrizo Creek, a seep that welled out of the stones and ran off down the desert and vanished again. Thousands of sheep had perished here and the travelers made their way among the yellowed bones and carcasses with their rags of tattered wool and they knelt among bones to drink. When the kid raised his dripping head from the water a rifleball dished his reflection from the pool and the echoes of the shot clattered about the bonestrewn slopes and clanged away in the desert and died.

  He spun on his belly and clambered sideways, scanning the skyline. He saw the horses first, standing nose to nose in a notch among the dunes to the south. He saw the judge clad in the gusseted clothing of his recent associates. He was holding the mouth of the upright rifle in his fist and pouring powder from a flask down the bore. The imbecile, naked save for a hat, squatted in the sands at his feet.

  The kid scuttled to a low place in the ground and lay flat with the pistol in his fist and the creek trickling past his elbow. He turned to look for the expriest but he could not find him. He could see through the lattice of bones the judge and his charge on the hill in the sun and he raised the pistol and rested it in the saddle of a rancid pelvis and fired. He saw the sand jump on the slope behind the judge and the judge leveled the rifle and fired and the rifleball whacked through the bones and the shots rolled away over the dunelands.

  The kid lay with his heart hammering in the sand. He thumbed back the hammer again and raised his head. The idiot sat as before and the judge was trudging sedately along the skyline looking over the windrowed bones below him for an advantage. The kid began to move again. He moved into the creek on his belly and lay drinking, holding up the pistol and the powderflask and sucking at the water. Then he moved out the far side and down a trampled corridor through the sands where wolves had gone to and fro. Off to his left he thought he heard the expriest hiss at him and he could hear the creek and he lay listening. He set the hammer at halfcock and rotated the cylinder and recharged the empty chamber and capped the piece and raised up to look. The shallow ridge along which the judge had advanced was empty and the two horses were coming toward him across the sand to the south. He cocked the pistol and lay watching. They approached freely over the barren pitch, nudging the air with their heads, their tails whisking. Then he saw the idiot shambling along behind them like some dim neolithic herdsman. To his right he saw the judge appear from the dunes and reconnoitre and drop from sight again. The horses continued on and there was a scrabbling behind him and when the kid turned the expriest was in the corridor hissing at him.

  Shoot him, he called.

  The kid spun about to look for the judge but the expriest called again in his hoarse whisper.

  The fool. Shoot the fool.

  He raised his pistol. The horses stepped one and the next through a break in the yellowed palings and the imbecile shambled after and disappeared. He looked back at Tobin but the expriest was gone. He moved along the corridor until he came to the creek again, already slightly roiled from the drinking horses above him. His leg had begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like thin red leeches in the current. He looked at the sun.

  Hello called the judge, his voic
e off to the west. As if there were new riders to the creek and he addressed them.

  The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out again. Come out, he called. There's plenty of water for everybody.

  The kid had swung the powderflask around to his back to keep it out of the creek and he held the pistol up and waited. Upstream the horses had stopped drinking. Then they started drinking again.

  When he moved out on the far side of the creek he came upon the hand and foot tracks left by the expriest among the prints of cats and foxes and the little desert pigs. He entered a clearing in that senseless midden and sat listening. His leather clothes were heavy and stiff with water and his leg was throbbing. A horse's head came up streaming water at the muzzle a hundred feet away over the bones and dropped from sight again. When the judge called out his voice was in a new place. He called out for them to be friends. The kid watched a small caravan of ants bearing off among the arches of sheepribs. In the watching his eyes met the eyes of a small viper coiled under a flap of hide. He wiped his mouth and began to move again. In a culdesac the tracks of the expriest terminated and came back. He lay listening. It was hours till dark. After a while he heard the idiot slobbering somewhere among the bones.

  He heard the wind coming in off the desert and he heard his own breathing. When he raised his head to look out he saw the expriest stumbling among the bones and holding aloft a cross he'd fashioned out of the shins of a ram and he'd lashed them together with strips of hide and he was holding the thing before him like some mad dowser in the bleak of desert and calling out in a tongue both alien and extinct.

  The kid stood up, the revolver in both hands. He wheeled. He saw the judge and the judge was in another quarter altogether and he had the rifle already at his shoulder. When he fired Tobin turned around facing the way he'd come and sat down still holding the cross. The judge put down the rifle and took up another. The kid tried to steady the barrel of the pistol and he let off the shot and then dropped to the sand. The heavy ball of the rifle passed overhead like an asteroid and chattered and chopped among the bones fanned over the rise of ground beyond. He raised to his knees and looked for the judge but the judge was not there. He reloaded the empty chamber and began to move again on his elbows toward the spot where he'd seen the expriest fall, taking his bearings by the sun and pausing from time to time to listen. The ground was trampled with the tracks of predators come in from the plains for the carrion and the wind carrying through the breaks bore with it a sour reek like the stink of a rancid dishclout and there was no sound except the wind anywhere at all.

  He found Tobin kneeling in the creek bathing his wound with a piece of linen torn from his shirt. The ball had passed completely through his neck. It had narrowly missed the carotid artery yet he could not make the blood to stop. He looked at the kid crouched among the skulls and upturned ribtines.

  You've got to kill the horses, he said. You've no other chance out of here. He'll ride you down.

  We could take the horses.

  Dont be a fool lad. What other bait has he?

  We can get out as soon as it comes dark.

  Do you think there'll be no day again?

  The kid watched him. Will it not stop? he said.

  It will not.

  What do you think?

  I've got to stop it.

  The blood was running between his fingers.

  Where is the judge? said the kid.

  Where indeed.

  If I kill him we can take the horses.

  You'll not kill him. Dont be a fool. Shoot the horses.

  The kid looked off up the shallow sandy creek.

  Go on lad.

  He looked at the expriest and at the slow gouts of blood dropping in the water like roseblooms how they swelled and were made pale. He moved away up the creek.

  When he came to where the horses had entered the water they were gone. The sand on the side where they'd gone out was still wet. He pushed the revolver along before him, moving on the heels of his hands. For all his caution he found the idiot watching him before ever he saw it.

  It was sitting motionless in a bower of bones with the broken sunlight stenciled over its vacant face and it was watching like a wild thing in a wood. The kid looked at it and then he shoved on past in the tracks of the horses. The loose neck swiveled slowly and the dull jaw drooled. When he looked back it was still watching. Its wrists were lying in the sand before it and although there was no expression to its face yet it seemed a creature beset with a great woe.

  When he saw the horses they were standing on a rise of ground above the creek and looking toward the west. He lay quietly and studied the terrain. Then he moved out along the edge of the wash and sat with his back to the bone salients and cocked the pistol and took a rest with his elbows on his knees.

  The horses had seen him come out of the wash and they were watching him. When they heard the pistol cock they pricked their ears and began to walk toward him across the sand. He shot the forward horse in the chest and it fell over and lay breathing heavily with the blood running out of its nose. The other one stopped and stood uncertainly and he cocked the pistol and shot it as it turned. It began to trot among the dunes and he shot it again and its front legs buckled and it pitched forward and rolled onto its side. It raised its head once and then it lay still.

  He sat listening. Nothing moved. The first horse lay as it had fallen, the sand about its head darkening with blood. The smoke drifted away down the draw and thinned and vanished. He moved back down the wash and crouched under the ribs of a dead mule and recharged the pistol and then moved on toward the creek again. He did not go back the way he'd come and he did not see the imbecile again. When he came to the creek he drank and bathed his leg and lay listening as before.

  Throw that gun out now, said the judge.

  He froze.

  The voice was not fifty feet away.

  I know what you've done. The priest put you up to it and I'll take that as a mitigation in the act and the intent. Which I would any man in his wrongdoing. But there's the question of property. You bring me the pistol now.

  The kid lay without moving. He heard the judge wade the creek upstream. He lay counting slowly under his breath. When the roiled water reached him he stopped counting and let go on the current a dry twist of grass and tolled it away downstream. At that same count it was scarcely out of sight among the bones. He moved out of the water and looked at the sun and began to make his way back to where he'd left Tobin.

  He found the expriest's tracks still wet where he'd left the creek and the way of his progress marked with blood. He followed through the sand until he came to that place where the expriest had circled upon himself and lay hissing at him from his place of cover.

  Did you do for them lad?

  He raised his hand.

  Aye. I heard the shots all three. The fool as well, aye lad?

  He didnt answer.

  Good lad, hissed the expriest. He'd bound up his neck in his shirt and he was naked to the waist and he squatted among those rancid pickets and eyed the sun. The shadows were long on the dunes and in the shadow the bones of the beasts that had died there lay skewed in a curious congress of garbled armatures upon the sands. They'd close to two hours till dark and the expriest said so. They lay under the boardlike hide of a dead ox and listened to the judge calling to them. He called out points of jurisprudence, he cited cases. He expounded upon those laws pertaining to property rights in beasts mansuete and he quoted from cases of attainder insofar as he reckoned them germane to the corruption of blood in the prior and felonious owners of the horses now dead among the bones. Then he spoke of other things. The expriest leaned to the kid. Dont listen, he said.

  I aint listenin.

  Stop your ears.

  Stop yours.

  The priest cupped his hands over his ears and looked at the kid. His eyes were bright from the bloodloss and he was possessed of a great earnestness. Do it, he whispered. Do
you think he speaks to me?

  The kid turned away. He marked the sun squatting at the western rim of the waste and they spoke no more until it was dark and then they rose and made their way out.

  They stole up from the basin and set off across the shallow dunes and they looked a last time back at the valley where flickering in the wind at the edge of the revetment stood the judge's nightfire for all to see. They did not speculate as to what it fed upon for fuel and they were well advanced on the desert before the moon rose.

  There were wolves and jackals in that region and they cried all the forepart of the night until the moon came up and then they ceased as if surprised by its rising. Then they began again. The pilgrims were weak from their wounds. They lay down to rest but never for long and never without scanning the skyline to the east for any figure intruded upon it and they shivered in the barren desert wind coming out of whatever godless quadrant cold and sterile and bearing news of nothing at all. When day came they made their way to a slight rise on that endless flat and squatted in the loose shale and watched the sun's rising. It was cold and the expriest in his rags and his collar of blood hugged himself. On this small promontory they slept and when they woke it was midmorning and the sun well advanced. They sat up and looked out. Coming toward them over the plain in the middle distance they could see the figure of the judge, the figure of the fool.

  XXI

  Desert castaways - The backtrack - A hideout - The wind takes a side - The judge returns - An address - Los Dieguenos - San Felipe - Hospitality of the savages - Into the mountains - Grizzlies - San Diego - The sea.

  The kid looked at Tobin but the expriest sat without expression. He was drawn and wretchedlooking and the approaching travelers seemed to evoke in him no recognition. He raised his head slightly and he spoke without looking at the kid. Go on, he said. Save yourself.

  The kid took the water bottle from the shales and unstoppered it and drank and handed it across. The expriest drank and they sat watching and then they rose and turned and set out again.

  They were much reduced by their wounds and their hunger and they made a poor show as they staggered onward. By noon their water was gone and they sat studying the barrenness about. A wind blew down from the north. Their mouths were dry. The desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it. The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circumscribed and of them were they locus. They rose and went on. The sky was luminous. There was no trace to follow other than the bits of cast-off left by travelers even to the bones of men drifted out of their graves in the scalloped sands. In the afternoon the terrain began to rise before them and at the crest of a shallow esker they stood and looked back to see the judge much as before some two miles distant on the plain. They went on.